Tuesday, August 5, 2008

People are complex

I just finished reading David Coleman's latest blog over at Collaborate.com - Is Trust Critical for Collaboration.Â David comes to an interesting conclusion that I can and do support.Â I too have been one of those people that put trust at the top of the list when it came to collaboration and community. Oh, read the article for his conclusion about trust. :-)

Having just gone through a bit of a team crisis, I can attest to the fact that cultural context is more important to collaboration than is trust.Â The team trusted each other, worked OK together, but even though we were not geographically dispersed we did not share a common cultural context.

David is spot on with when he said "People are complex and the interactions between them are even more complex, and from complex systems arise emergent characteristics which canâ€™t be planned for, and often canâ€™t be managed or controlled."

It is frustrating when command and control kicks in to address the "problems" that arise from these complex people interactions.